This Is My Story of Letting Go, Lightening Up, and Falling Back in Love With Life

WHEN I RECONNECTED WITH WHO I TRULY AM, THE FEAR, DOUBT, AND INNER STRUGGLE BEGAN TO FALL AWAY.

Life stopped being something I had to fix or chase. It became something I could trust, enjoy, and fully experience.

Hi, I’m Michaela Weaver — TEDx speaker, best-selling author, and a woman who reached a point where waking up to life became the only true path forward.

Waking up to life is the foundation of deep joy, peace, and freedom.

No more chasing the next goal or filling the silence with doing. So many successful women reach midlife feeling unfulfilled—anxious, restless, always searching for the missing piece.

Even with full lives and full calendars, something still feels off. That’s when the whisper comes:

There must be more than this.

And you’re right—there is.

AS FEATURED IN

ASSOCIATIONS & MEMBERSHIP

This is my life story.

In 2014, I would lace up my running shoes before dawn, hoping that motion might quiet my racing mind. On paper, I had everything—professional success, family, great friends, coaching credentials, mindfulness training. But inwardly, I was striving, juggling, and waiting… for peace, for happiness, for the day it would all finally click.

What no one saw was the invisible weight I carried. A restless hum of not quite there yet that followed me from boardrooms to parenting, from meditations to meetings.

When I think about it, I have always questioned the meaning of life and happiness. I never took things at face value.

From a young age, I found myself asking: Is this all there is? I sensed a deeper truth behind what I was taught to chase. The idea that success or happiness could be achieved “out there” never sat quite right with me, even before I had words for why.

I grew up in a house with a physicist, and big, open questions went hand-in-hand with that.

Reality was always up for debate in our home. But it took many years before I realised the mind creates its own version of truth—and that I had been living inside a mental movie I didn’t know I was watching. I spent my early years in London, then moved to a quiet rural village in Wales at age nine.

Something about the move, leaving the city, leaving my friends, and everything that I had known left me feeling insecure.

It was a rupture I didn’t understand at the time. A subtle sense that I had to adapt to survive. That I had to work hard to feel safe.

That feeling never entirely left me...

So I poured myself into striving. Back in London at 18, studying science and engineering, I adopted the fast-paced rhythm of modern life. Work hard, play hard. Outwardly accomplished. Inwardly unsettled. I was trying to earn a sense of wholeness. It affected everything—especially my marriage.

I worked hard, played hard…

I also worried hard.

No matter how much I achieved, I carried the sense that something was still missing. It was like chasing a mirage—just when I thought I was getting close, it would disappear into the distance again. I drove myself harder, thinking if I could just get one more thing right, everything would fall into place.

I sabotaged myself by over-compensating and over-working...

I over-delivered in every area of life—at home, at work, even in friendships. I became a master of holding it all together on the outside while unravelling silently on the inside. I placed impossible expectations on myself, and when I couldn’t meet them, I worked even harder. I thought this was strength.

But in truth, it was a deep disconnection from myself—a belief that if I wasn’t achieving, I wasn’t enough. The pressure became constant. I was always pushing forward, never arriving.

MY MIND HAD TAKEN ME DOWN A LABYRINTH OF FEAR, SELF-DOUBT, FEELING SMALL IN A HUGE AND UNSAFE WORLD.

My inner reality was completely different to what others saw.

The mask was convincing, but behind it, I longed for stillness, for homecoming. I didn’t realise then that what I was seeking couldn’t be found by doing more—but by letting go.

Running a business and raising three children alone was incredibly hard...

The weight of responsibility felt relentless. I craved an off-switch for the mental noise and emotional load.

Laying the foundations for Rise UP Together and Awaken™

Throughout my career, I worked as a management consultant and executive coach.

I worked with the Cabinet Office in London...

I stood at the intersection of logic and leadership, change and challenge. But I hadn’t yet connected the dots between the external systems I worked with and the inner systems that shaped my own reality.

My work was always about transformation—of people, systems, culture. I loved guiding clients to insight and change. But even with all my qualifications in NLP, psychology, and coaching, something fundamental still eluded me.

Over time, all the threads of my life—my questions, my training, my lived experience—began weaving themselves into something new. I wasn’t just building a brand. I was giving form to a deeper truth, creating the roots of what would become Rise Together and Awaken. A movement, a method, and a message that would one day help other women walk the path of awakening too.

The mantra in my childhood home was:

‘QUESTION EVERYTHING.’

That stuck with me. But it took decades to realise the most powerful questions were not about the world—but about who is experiencing the world. The right question is everything.

My awakening felt like being yanked out of a dream.

It was like being grabbed by the scruff of the neck and pulled out of a movie I didn’t know I was starring in. One moment, I was consumed by the inner chaos of striving and fixing, and the next—I saw through it. Something in me broke open.

There was no ceremony. No fanfare. Just a clear and irreversible shift in perspective. What I had spent years trying to manage or improve—the anxiety, the seeking, the relentless drive to feel “better”—suddenly felt like smoke. I could see that I had been hypnotised by my own thoughts, believing every fear, every doubt, every story as if it were gospel. And then, in what felt like an instant, I realised: none of it was real.

That was the moment I woke up. Not in the poetic sense, but in the most literal and liberating way. I had seen behind the curtain. I had dropped the illusion. The idea that I needed to change myself dissolved, because I could finally see—I was never broken to begin with.

The noise stopped. And underneath it, there was peace.

I often talk about happiness and the trap of unhappiness as the 'game of opposites'. When we know that nothing is as it seems and that everything is up for questioning, then we also begin to see that beliefs close to us that actually cause us harm, are not to be believed in either.

These beliefs are part of the human shadow, self-protect mechanism, or mini-me. They are based on a belief that the self needs to be protected, and in an effort to do that, the mini-me does the very thing that causes the need for protection! It’s a paradox, and the way out is a paradigm shift of thinking and consciousness.

This is the essence of my process to awaken and discover the happiness within.

Not a happiness you earn. A happiness that’s always been there, simply obscured by mental clouds. My method is not self-help. It’s self-remembrance.

MY AWAKENING TO SELF-REDISCOVERY AND A DEEP PEACE AND HAPPINESS

After my paradigm shift, I became used to living in a world where other people’s realities were shaped by mental narratives.

I saw the illusion in those stories—just as I had seen through my own.

Over the years, I explored teachings across the spectrum—from neuroscience and psychology to non-duality, quantum theory to ancient mysticism.

And slowly, I began to live in peace. The noise dropped. Life became lighter.

What had once seemed overwhelming now felt spacious. I didn’t need to change anything.

I had discovered that happiness is not a state—it’s who we are when the seeking ends.

4 YEARS LATER

Four years after my inner transformation, I packed up my motorbike and rode solo through Spain.

Not to escape. Not to search. But to embody everything I had come to know. Out there in the open landscape, I met myself again—not the self I had tried to perfect, but the one who had always been quietly there beneath it all.

The journey confirmed what I already knew: I was home.

It is my mission to guide you to find your happiness, free of constraints and internal drama and narratives. This work is not about coping strategies or temporary fixes. It’s about awakening—fully and deeply—to the truth of who you already are.

Through Rise Together and Awaken, my multidimensional framework rooted in consciousness, psychology, and spiritual truth, I guide women into a profound inner shift—away from the mental noise and into a clear, connected, embodied presence.

You were never broken. You don’t need fixing. You only need to wake up to what’s already here.

I am a Fellow of The Association for Coaching and the ACCPH, with multiple Master-level certifications in executive coaching, NLP, hypnotherapy, and Time Line Therapy. My teaching is grounded in metaphor, lived experience, and spiritual depth. This journey is about returning to your natural state—awake, whole, and free. And while it's yours to walk, you don’t have to walk it alone. Let’s rise together.

Before founding the Rise Up Together and Awaken movement, I was creator of The Alcohol Coach, where I helped thousands of women reclaim their power and peace

This is for you if you want:

Answers

Deep self discovery

Truth

Fulfilment

Happiness

Peace

Wholeness

My ground-breaking methods blend science, psychology, and spiritual wisdom into a powerful, integrated approach. This fusion isn’t just theory—it’s a practical path that renews your sense of self, bringing fulfilment across every area of your life, from the inside out.

When we release the pressure to become someone, space opens. In that space, your true self rises—effortless, unburdened, whole. I guide you to see clearly who you are beyond external expectations. The irony is: only in letting go, do we become.

I work with women in the rich, unfolding chapters of midlife—women who have raised families, built careers, navigated love and loss. Some are single, some in partnership. Some are standing at the edge of change, others feel it stirring quietly within. What connects them all is a longing to live more deeply, more truthfully. They are women who sense there is more—a fuller, freer, more radiant version of life calling to them. And they are ready to answer.

LET'S TALK